One Dark Night
by AndromedaStarr
Summary: Why Rick Stetler misses Tim Speedle. Slash. Not as bad as it sounds, I swear. Oneshot. Reviews are greatly appreciated and will be repaid in chocolate.


**Summary:** Rick Stetler, everyone's favourite rat squad boy, delves into the past and comes up with a very good reason indeed for why he misses Tim Speedle. Slash. Rated M for reasons which should be obvious.

**Disclaimers:** I own nothing except an Inspiron 6400 and one hell of an imagination.

* * *

It's such a pity.

I'm not usually one for blood and gore, but I can't say I'm not disappointed that they'd moved him by the time I got to the scene. The blood pool wasn't good enough. The police presence and the media crews outside weren't enough. Seeing Horatio Caine almost in pieces, almost in tears...even that wasn't good enough. I wanted to see Speedle. I wanted to see his face.

When I offered Horatio my condolences, he didn't seem convinced. It's hardly surprising. He and I haven't gotten along in years, not since he stole the promotion that was mine. But that's another story for another day.

The fact of the matter is, I meant it when I said I was sorry. I am, more than Horatio or anyone else can understand. I'll miss Speedle. Not because he was an efficient CSI, or because he was a good person. I don't know about any of those things. I'll miss him because of our first ever meeting, a twist of fate that happened roughly twelve years ago in the dead of one dark night I will never forget.

I was a rookie cop, and I'd been shafted something awful for the whole of that week. I'd been given ticket duty at night on a single stretch of long, lonely, flat road. Despite it being a prime location for drag-racing, there was hardly any traffic on it. I'm giving a grossly exaggerated estimate here when I say that in those five nights, I must've seen about twenty cars. And none had been going fast enough for me to ticket.

So there I was, slouched in the cruiser with the engine idling, sipping coffee and wondering exactly why the fuck I'd chosen this crappy career in the first place. It was a hot night, with no breeze, and mosquitoes had somehow managed to find themselves inside the car. I was tired, I was hungry, I was pissed off.

And then it happened. Out of nowhere, there was a sudden loud roar, and this maniac on a motorbike shot past my cruiser as though I was going in reverse. There was _no_ way I was letting this one go. How many hours had I sat there like an idiot waiting to write a ticket? Far too many not to give chase, I'll tell you.

So I gunned the engine and I gave chase. A nice high-speed chase just like they show in the movies, only it was just me and the bike and one godforsaken stretch of asphalt. But I chased that son of a bitch right on down that road until he finally pulled over maybe four miles later. Are you going to ask me if I was pissed? No, you're not. You damn well know I was pissed, because you'd have felt the same way.

Now, I'm not trying to justify what happened. I know it was wrong, there's no excuse, yadda yadda. I'm just saying.

Anyway. The rider? Once I got the helmet off of him, he was just a kid. He couldn't have been more than eighteen, with messy dark hair that was trying to grow in every direction at once, a round face and a set of lips that made my brain want to eat itself on the spot. And just so you know, I'm not gay. Wasn't into men then and I'm not into them now. But - honesty being the best policy and all - I'll be damned if I'm going to stand here and tell you that boy didn't have a mouth on him.

He was high too, totally fucking stoned on what turned out to be methamphetamines. His pupils were pinpoints in the darkness, he was sweating and shivering even though it was hotter than hell, he was grinning constantly although he couldn't tell me what there was to grin about. His name was Timothy Speedle. His friends called him Speed.

I asked him if he had any idea how fast he was going, because I sure didn't.

Speedle gave the most reckless smile in the universe. "I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's how I keep up with my head."

I asked him what the fuck he was talking about, and he explained. Sort of. The story I got went something like this.

"When I get high, you know, it's like flying. My head's flying. And what screws up the high, what really brings you down, is the fact that your body's still down here. Your body's not flying. So I figured that if I could make my body fly, everything would be okay. That's why I go so fast. It's to keep myself together. When I'm on the bike and it's just open road and I'm going flat out...it's beautiful. Nothing can stop me."

I denounced this as bullshit and told him he was going to get a ticket for meeting and/or exceeding approximately the velocity of a bat out of hell. He seemed amenable to that. But everything changed when I mentioned the drug charge.

"No. No, no, no. You can't charge me for drugs, man."

I asked him why the fuck not.

"You know what it's like to be addicted to something? I suck cock for speed, man. Trade head for my high. That's how bad I am. You know what I'd do to get off this drug charge?"

And before I could say or do - or even think - anything at all, he had grabbed my wrist and he was pulling me towards the cruiser, leaving his bike alone, just a glint of metal in the headlights of the car. I sat in the driver's seat and automatically closed the door. I like to think I had no idea what he was going to do, but to be straight with you, I knew exactly what he had in mind. And no matter which way I call it and how I try to stretch the truth, I did nothing to stop him.

I shoulda stopped him. I shoulda been a better man, a better cop. I shouldn't have taken advantage of a drugged-out kid with a sweet mouth. But sitting there, pressed back into the seat with my eyes closed and one hand fisted in Speedle's soft dark hair, I couldn't help but feel like it was his fault.

It was wrong in a million different ways. I knew it then and I know it now, but that changes nothing. It happened. He happened to me.

He lifted his head, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and sat in a dazed, awkward silence as I struggled with the necessary matters of hygiene associated with events like this one. "So," he said once I'd cleaned myself up and put myself back together. "You still gonna charge me for the drugs?"

Of course, I didn't. I wrote out the ticket as fast as I could and I sent him on his way with as few words as I could get away with. I don't think anything I said even made sense, but he was too strung out to notice.

I often wondered in the years that passed what in the hell had happened to the kid. Had he come off the drugs, did he still ride bikes, did he still suck cock for a score. Who else he'd blown to get off with a rap on the knuckles instead of a charge.

By the time I met CSI Tim Speedle, he didn't remember me. I figured he wouldn't, he'd been that high that night. But I definitely remembered him. He looked a little older, and he had a great deal of five o'clock shadow that hadn't been there at eighteen. But the hair was still the same. He still rode bikes. And the mouth. He still had that mouth, and I'd have recognized it anywhere.

I'd have liked to see it again, just one more time, before they buried him.

Pity.


End file.
